Restoring ancient peat bogs is vital to trap harmful carbon

RSPB's Colin Davies on a new film showing the benefits of restoring and protecting peat bogs

A new film shows how restoring Wales’ extensive peat bogs can help benefit wildlife and improve the quality of our environment by reducing flood risk and helping fight climate change by locking up atmospheric carbon.

The film that has been produced and filmed by RSPB Cymru, shows that if peatlands are restored, farmers will lose fewer sheep, which can become trapped in drainage ditches.

Many people see peat bogs as soggy barren places where you get stuck and lose your wellington boot, or where archaeologists dig up the occasional perfectly-preserved four-thousand-year old body!

The closest many of us will get to a peat bog is picking up the bagged up stuff at our local garden centre to pot plants (this is not recommended because there are plenty of ecologically friendly peat free compost alternatives).

But peat bogs have been getting a rather lot of publicity lately.

A peat bog over six times the size of Wales has been discovered in the Congo in Africa.

And in recognition of the value of Welsh peat bogs, Alun Davies AM recently announced the Welsh Government’s ambitious plan to bring all Welsh peatlands into restoration management within seven years.

Wales has a lot of peat bog; an estimated 70,000 hectares of upland blanket bog scattered all the way from Snowdonia to Pembrokeshire and the South Wales Valleys. However, much of this is not in its pristine natural wet condition due to historic drainage and burning aimed at improving land for agriculture and post-war afforestation.

Over thousands of years that vegetation has been growing and compacting at a rate of a miniscule 0.5 to 1mm a year. It doesn’t sound like much but over millennia, many Welsh peat bogs have become four to six metres deep, some even more.

As the bog grows and the moss partially decomposes to form peat, it draws in that all important climate change gas – carbon dioxide – and stores it as carbon within the peat. And it’s incredibly efficient at doing that.

Here are some mind-blowing stats that you may not be aware of.

Although peatlands only cover around 3% of the world’s surface they contain more carbon than all of the world’s rainforests.

Peatlands are the UK’s single-most important terrestrial carbon store, containing 20 times more carbon than all UK forests.

In Wales, nine times more carbon is stored in peat than in all vegetation. And although Britain is a very small island, it does in fact contain an amazing 13% of the world’s upland blanket bog.

So just like cutting down rainforests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, draining and drying out peat bogs does the same.

It is estimated that those drained and damaged peat bogs in the UK currently pump out 3.7m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year; that’s equivalent to the average emissions of 660,000 households (that’s all the houses of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds combined).

However - and this is the true value and potential of peatlands – unlike rainforests that take decades to restore, damaged peatlands can be returned through filling in drainage ditches with a digger to become functioning peat bogs that draw in carbon in matter of years.

Indeed, on average, healthy peat bogs remove between 30 to 70 tonnes of carbon per square kilometre from the atmosphere annually. And not only that, making damaged bogs healthy again is relatively cheap.

An experienced digger operator can put in a dam in quite a short space of time and you can quite quickly re-wet a hectare of peat bog.

So there is no doubt that restoring peatlands presents a massive opportunity to both the Welsh and UK Governments in helping to meet their binding targets of reducing carbon emissions by 40% and 34% respectively, from their 1990 level by 2020.

However, this is not the only benefit of peatland restoration.

For example, 70% of our drinking water in the UK comes from upland areas and it is vital that peat bogs are in good condition, so that the water we drink is good quality and costs are kept low for customers.

Appropriately managed, restoring peat bogs can also provide habitat for some of Wales’ most endangered species like the curlew and the golden plover, which were once common in Wales but have seen a massive decrease in recent decades.

The golden plover has seen more than an 80% reduction in its numbers in recent decades in many areas. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that retaining water in upland areas will reduce flooding in lowland valleys. One of the most important elements to consider when restoring peatland is the people who live and work in these upland areas.

The vast majority of Welsh uplands are farmed in some way and although some farmers are yet to be convinced that peatlands restoration will directly benefit their businesses, some farmers like Glyn Roberts, who farms in the Migneint area of North Wales, believes that the farming community should support the work for wider environmental reasons.

He said: “We as an industry have an obligation to do everything that we can to mitigate as much as we can against global warming and in this context, I think it’s a good thing”.

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